The Wooden Horse

Chapter Six

The West Wing of the nursing home was for private rooms. Some were occupied by hospice patients, who weren’t expected to live very much longer. Others were for residents who could afford to pay for what level of privacy a nursing home could provide. Then there was Ann’s room. Actually, she had two rooms that had been specially modified for her unique situation. A wall had been partially removed, leaving a large bedroom, a sitting room with special equipment and monitors and a small cubby room with a twin sized bed for her sitters use. The sitting room was home to several servers that housed a library of Virtual Reality experiences, including all kinds of scenarios, games, places, and even tailor made memories. The VR equipment also recorded and stored all of Ann’s interaction with the system, along with her own vital readings and health statistics over the five decades she’d been using the technology. The whole process was symbiotic. Both Ann and HiTechMed had achieved so very much through their relationship over the years.

Alyssa was preparing Ann for Interface. This required a series of connections to Ann’s person, using specialized tabs that monitored her heart rate, blood pressure, pulse, brain activity, perspiration, oxidation levels, and many more vital health statistics. The direct cranial studs were located in six locations on her shaved head, and these had to be cleaned and prepped before attaching the leads. Finally, there was the visor. Not a helmet, exactly, since it didn’t cover her head. It had the look of a motorcycle visor, but didn’t rest on Ann’s head directly. Alyssa fitted a halo collar around Ann’s head that the visor was form fitted and attached to. It’s LCD screen provides the canvas for the program’s wide variety of artistic expression. Tucked into a corner of the room is a back up power source generator that can operated the computer’s servers for up to twelve hours in the event of an outage. It was redundant, for the nursing homes back up diesel generator is designed to kick in immediately after the power goes out. Alyssa had a clipboard in one hand, and checked off each item as she checked, then rechecked it. It was not unlike a fighter pilot’s pre flight ritual. Although she’d done it thousands of times, she religiously ticked off every item carefully. The devil is in the details was her thought.

Ann lay in the bed, her eyes closed. The “sitting room” had enough room for her BCI/VR equipment, her bed, and Alyssa. Her bed could be rolled from her room to the equipment, eliminating the need to move Ann. While not cramped, it was certainly “cozy”.
“Ok, Ann. I’m almost done. Your access program is ready. How about you?” She looked over to Ann. There was only one slow, deliberate blink from the frail little lady.
“Good. Here comes the visor.” She gently lowered the visor over her face, carefully matching the edges with the collar around Ann’s head until a slight “snap” was felt. She checked the leads one last time, then sat down at the small office chair and scooted up to the keyboard/monitor and keyed in the last sequence of commands. Alyssa put her earpiece/mic set on, and settled back in her chair. She pulled her paperback novel from the desk in front of her and relaxed.

The BCI/VR had an Artificial Intelligence Operating System named “EVE”. Eve and Ann interacted on the screen by a variety of methods. Pupil dilation, blink series, and eye movement were combined with Eve’s experienced Predictive Options program to give Ann multiple options, based on her past choices of words, phrases and thoughts. These appeared on the LCD screen in HiDef, with audible prompts along the way. She was able to write, to speak, and even to draw and paint, in this manner. There was a lag time, but considering the fact that Ann could only move her eyes, it was still a phenomenal achievement in human/computer interaction. Ann had certainly made the most of it. She had made the New York Times Bestseller list with her first book. That was after years of LIS. She and Eve had over four decades of practice since then.

Alyssa heard a small “beep” through her headphones.
“Yes, Ann?” She asked, looking up at her monitor. The rectangular “chat box” typed it out as she spoke.
“Are you still reading that junk?” Ann responded.
Ayssa smiled. Her taste in reading was a far cry from Ann’s. The dog-eared paperback was her escape from reality. She loved Beverly Lewis novels. This last book in the “Seasons of Grace” series had her attention riveted. Amish romance was her weakness. It irked Ann to no end.
“Yes. Two more chapters left. And don’t look up the ending and ruin it for me again. That was kinda mean of you last time, in case I hadn’t told you.” She smiled. She and Ann had become so very close over the years. They could tell what each other were thinking almost as well as Eve could tell what Ann would say next. Alyssa read some more from “The Telling” as Ann laboriously composed a short response. She only managed to read one page before it beeped onto the screen.
“I’m sorry. You’re right, that was mean. Forgive me? I AM dying, however. Can you forgive me? I should get a pass for wanting you to read worthy literature.”
Alyssa grinned. Her friend’s sarcasm oozed politely through the sentence.
“Worthy is in the eye of the beholder. You taught me that, Ann. And yes, consider yourself forgiven. You’re a bit unrepentant, but still forgiven.” She said.
The pause lingered through the air for only a few minutes.
“Thank you.” Said Ann. The words on the screen were a pretty script, in pink even. Alyssa smiled. Ann liked to show emotion with color sometimes. Alyssa noted that Ann had selected a VR video to watch. It was her favorite. A memory of her childhood.

The field stretched out before her, on a landscape of slightly rolling hills. The crisp green rows of crops followed the horizon to the clear blue sky. The clouds passed over, clean, white and pure. Ann watched the clouds float by for several minutes. She never tired of watching the clouds. They calmed her, soothed her. The sun’s bright noonday light sent faint, but large, shadows crawling across the field. A particularly large shadow crawled slowly over a stand of trees at the edge of the horizon. Ann could barely make them out, they were so far out. She focused slightly on the trees, then blinked once, then once more. The stand of trees zoomed in until she stood before them. They were just a few dozen old hickory trees. Nearby was a large patch of bare dirt that a John Deere Combine was parked on. Off to the right lay a farm road, double rutted and well used. She’d been here a lot. She’d driven tractors and combines over every inch of these hills. She had grown up here. It was her family’s farm and had been for four generations. She remembered the smells, imagined she could feel the wind on her face. Even the smell of the hickory trees came to her. She stood there, in her imagined body, and looked up to the cloud as it passed out of the way of the sun. The brightness flooded her eyes, the dampers of the VR program toning it down to keep from damaging her eyes or causing any pain. She closed her eyes and could see the glow of red, just as if it were real. She couldn’t feel the warmth, however. Only because she hadn’t turned on the visor’s input sensors. She felt it in her mind, though, and that was enough for today.

She missed being outside. She missed feeling a real sun. She missed all the familiar smells of her childhood. She missed life on this big old farm. Even when the work was hard, and the days that seemed to never end. She missed so many things about her childhood. Her parents had passed away nearly twenty years ago, but they’d instilled within her soul a love of this land. They’d been good stewards of the land, and the land had been good to them. Her brother’s son, and his family, still worked these fields. Or at least the fields these images represented so vividly. The farm had grown since her grandparents had worked it. Their love of it lived on in their grandchildren. Ann opened her eyes as she looked down again at the big combine. She looked at it for a long time. There were so many things that kept her coming back to this place from her past. The memories flowed so easily here, giving her clarity of mind that she felt nowhere else. They always ended up reminding her of the things she missed. It was inevitable, given her situation. The most important reason she always dwelt here, coming back here over and over through the years, wasn’t the memories of things she’d lost. The real reason she kept coming back here was the pesky feeling, no- the knowing – that something here was missing. A missing piece among the missing memories. She searched her mind and heart for so many years, trying to pry the piece from her mind, to no avail. It didn’t stop her from loving this place, from wanting to be here. She was drawn here like a horse to water. Sadly, she never got to taste the cool water. It always disappeared like a mirage when her mind wandered too close to it. Whatever it was, it was still missing. She just knew it was something she had loved very much.